I did not alter story says child minder

A CHILDMINDER accused of murdering a one-year-old boy told an operator during a 999 call that he might have been injured on a settee while playing with another child, a court was told yesterday.

Tina McLeod, 40, said that she made the comment in a “panic situation” even though she had not seen the girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, on the sofa in her house at Craigleith Hill Avenue, Edinburgh.

Mrs McLeod, a council-registered childminder, denies shaking and twisting Alexander to his severe injury, striking his head against a blunt object or surface and murdering him on July 26, 2001.

Cross-examining Mrs McLeod at the High Court in Edinburgh, Gerald Hanretty, QC, Advocate-Depute, said: “You weren’t entirely sure where the other child